The Truman Show: Metafictional Strategies and Breaches of the Simulacrum

Abstract

A decade ago since the release of The Truman Show in 1998, an analysis of this film shows the surprising contemporaneity of the reflection which still poses about our audio-visual society. This article explores these issues with a tiered structure: after an analysis of the narrative and rhetoric structures of metafictional character, it delves into the way it dramatizes the effects of simulacrum in social life, while questioning the scope of its consequences. These issues are approached through a textual analysis, with the help -in the first part- of the theoretical frame provided by authors as Waugh, Hutcheon and Stam. In the second part, the textual analysis is combined with a thematic approach, in order to study to what extent the film embodies patterns and phenomena related to the society of spectacle, and to the culture of simulacra as posed by Baudrillard.